Description: Looking for Miss America : A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, Paperback by Mifflin, Margot, ISBN 1640094903, ISBN-13 9781640094901, Like New Used, Free shipping in the US Winner of the Popular Culture Association’s Emily Toth Best Book in Women’s Studies Award
From an author praised for writing “delicious social history” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times) comes a lively account of memorable Miss America contestants, protests, and scandals—and how the pageant, now in its one hundredth year, serves as an unintended indicator of feminist progress
Looking for Miss America is a fast–paced narrative history of a curious and contradictory institution. From its start in 1921 as an Atlantic City tourist draw to its current incarnation as a scholarship competition, the pageant has indexed women’s status during periods of social change—the post–suffrage 1920s, the Eisenhower 1950s, the #MeToo era. This ever–changing institution has been shaped by war, evangelism, the rise of television and reality TV, and, significantly, by contestants who confounded expectations.
Spotlighting individuals, from Yolande Betbeze, whose refusal to pose in swimsuits led an angry sponsor to launch the rival Miss USA contest, to the first black winner, Vanessa Williams, who received death threats and was protected by sharpshooters in her hometown parade, Margot Mifflin shows how women made hard bargains even as they used the pageant for economic advancement. The pageant’s history includes, crucially, those it excluded; the notorious Rule Seven, which required contestants to be “of the white race,” was retired in the 1950s, but no women of color were crowned until the 1980s.
In rigorously researched, vibrant chapters that unpack each decade of the pageant, Looking for Miss America examines the heady blend of capitalism, patriotism, class anxiety, and cultural mythology that has fueled this American ritual.
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Book Title: Looking for Miss America : a Pageant's 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood
Number of Pages: 320 Pages
Language: English
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Topic: Women, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Popular Culture
Publication Year: 2021
Item Height: 3.2 in
Illustrator: Yes
Genre: Social Science, History
Item Weight: 12.4 Oz
Author: Margot Mifflin
Item Length: 10.5 in
Item Width: 7.8 in
Format: Trade Paperback
